Servant Leadership addresses a fundamental concern of the contemporary church by asking pertinent questions of the New Testament: Who became a leader in the Jesus movement and in Pauline Christianity? What was the social status of these leaders in the outside world as compared to the importance of such social status within the faith community? What practices characterized their leadership within the communities they served? The book explores models of leadership in the New Testament s two prime exemplars, Jesus and Paul, and in their respective communities of faith. It studies both Paul s statements and actions with regard to leadership issues with specific church communities, using Thessalonians, the Corinthians, the Galatians, and the Philippians correspondence as case studies in the practice of leadership. It concludes with a discussion of leadership challenges in the modern church and how a Pauline or Deutero-Pauline model can work for us today. The author shows how understanding one s followers, as well as the goals and purposes of the group one leads, is a fundamental function of leadership today, even in the corporate world. Similarly, although we expect Christian leadership to be confrontational and assertive at times, it must also be open to creating opportunities for others to exercise their gifts and, therefore, their leadership. Good leaders move others to respond to their own personal calls and commitments.

Throughout the last century, there has been continuous study of Paul as a writer of letters. Although this fact was acknowledged by previous generations of scholars, it was during the twentieth century that the study of ancient letter-writing practices came to the fore and began to be applied to the study of the letters of the New Testament. This volume seeks to advance the discussion of Paul's relationship to Greek epistolary traditions by evaluating the nature of ancient letters as well as the individual letter components. These features are evaluated alongside Paul's letters to better understand Paul's use and adaptations of these traditions in order to meet his communicative needs.

This is the twelfth volume of the hard-copy edition of a journal that has been published online (www.jgrchj.net) since 2000. Volume 1 was for 2000, Volume 2 was for 2001-2005, Volume 3 was for 2006, Volume 4 was for 2007, Volume 5 was for 2008, Volume 6 was for 2009, Volume 7 was for 2010, Volume 8 was for 2011-2012, Volume 9 was for 2013, Volume 10 was for 2014, Volume 11 was for 2015 and Volume 12 is for 2016. As they appear, the hard-copy editions will replace the online materials. The scope of JGRChJ is the texts, language and cultures of the Greco-Roman world of early Christianity and Judaism. The papers published in JGRChJ are designed to pay special attention to the 'larger picture' of politics, culture, religion and language, engaging as well with modern theoretical approaches. Contents Seth M. Ehorn and Mark Lee The Syntactical Function of ὰλλὰ καί in Phil. 2.4 Matthew Oseka Attentive to the Context: The Generic Name of God in the Classic Jewish Lexica and Grammars of the Middle Ages--A Historical and Theological Perspective David I. Yoon Ancient Letters of Recommendation and 2 Corinthians 3.1-3: A Literary Analysis Stanley E. Porter The Synoptic Problem: The State of the Question Greg Stanton Wealthier Supporters of Jesus of Nazareth Preston T. Massey Women, Talking and Silence: 1 Corinthians 11.5 and 14.34-35 in the Light of Greco-Roman Culture Hughson T. Ong The Language of the New Testament from a Sociolinguistic Perspective Jonathan M. Watt Semitic Language Resources of Ancient Jewish Palestine Stanley E. Porter The Use of Greek in First-Century Palestine: A Diachronic and Synchronic Examination

Theodoret’s People sheds new light on religious clashes of the mid-fifth century regarding the nature (or natures) of Christ. Adam M. Schor focuses on Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus, his Syrian allies, and his opponents, led by Alexandrian bishops Cyril and Dioscorus. Although both sets of clerics adhered to the Nicene creed, their contrasting theological statements led to hostilities, violence, and the permanent fracturing of the Christian community. Schor closely examines council transcripts, correspondence, and other records of communication. Using social network theory, he argues that Theodoret’s doctrinal coalition was actually a meaningful community, bound by symbolic words and traditions, riven with internal rivalries, and embedded in a wider world of elite friendship and patronage.

Pauline Allen and Bronwen Neil investigate crisis management as conducted by the increasingly important episcopal class in the 5th and 6th centuries. Their basic source is the neglected corpus of bishops’ letters in Greek and Latin, the letter being the most significant mode of communication and information-transfer in the period from 410 to 590 CE. The volume brings together into a wider setting a wealth of previous international research on episcopal strategies for dealing with crises of various kinds. Six broad categories of crisis are identified and analysed: population displacement, natural disasters, religious disputes and religious violence, social abuses and the breakdown of the structures of dependence. Individual case-studies of episcopal management are provided for each of these categories. This is the first comprehensive treatment of crisis management in the late-antique world, and the first survey of episcopal letter-writing across the later Roman empire.

Letter collections in late antiquity give witness to the flourishing of letter-writing, with the development of the mostly formulaic exchanges between elites of the Graeco-Roman world to a more wide-ranging correspondence by bishops and monks, as well as emperors and Gothic kings. The contributors to this volume study individual collections from the first to sixth centuries CE, ranging from the Pauline and Deutero-Pauline letters through monastic letters from Egypt, bishops' letter collections and early papal collections compiled for various purposes. This is the first multi-authored study of New Testament and late antique letter collections, crossing the traditional divide between these disciplines by focusing on Latin, Greek, Coptic and Syriac epistolary sources. It draws together leading scholars in the field of late antique epistolography from Australasia, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States.